Semiotica della disperazione e antigrammatica del futuro in Franz Kafka

It may seem quite puzzling that a writer of the caliber of Franz Kafka, who devoted his life to raising “the world into the Pure, the True, the Immutable” by means of literature, looked at his tool, language, as something constitutively ill-suited to express anything. Indeed, everything that detaches itself from the unity of life is in Kafka’s view hopelessly false; furthermore, as life is equated to faith, the very essence of separation is despair, and as a sign is any aliquid that stat pro aliquo in a relation de renvoi, semiosis is necessarily originated from and imbued with despair and mendacity. The inadequacy of language results in the absurdity of any description it is used to provide, especially when the tense at issue is future. But Kafka is very clear when he calls for rejecting despair, and he recognizes that the truth he states to be unachievable in theory is made somehow possible in art. In order to explain this overturn, the present paper discusses two ways in which, from Kafka’s perspective, language can be framed: namely, a grammatical model, and its opposite, an anti-grammatical one. It will be demonstrated that by pushing forward absurdity and switching from a grammatical use of language, which produces false descriptions of reality, to an anti-grammatical one, it is possible for Kafka to synchronize expressions with the choral pulse of life. Hence, semiosis becomes inexhaustible and gains back its bondages with reality, so that it can checkmate despair and be employed in a nomadic exercise of future.